September 2011

This sketch started from a curiosity about the rise and fall of companies in subjective editorial rankings like Fortune Magazine’s ranking of the top 500 corporations in the United States.

I did most of the work while taking the train from Boston to New York one morning, and later spent a couple hours here and there fixing it up further. Since it's a sketch piece, it's not perfect, but it's a fun example of how you can interact with a really large amount of data in a very fluid manner: 56 years × 500 companies × 3 variables = 84,000 data points!

Additional details for the curious:

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